


it will come back

by autoclaves



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Jude Perry Deserves Her Own Warning Tag, Unhealthy Relationships, a canon-adjacent study of jude perry and her relationship to avatardom, just some powerful ladies! hanging out! threatening to kill each other sometimes :), tma girls week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25699939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: Rewind—which choice? From which horrible choice did the fire first emerge? Which was the oxygen and which was the tinder and which was the thing that burned to ash?(Or: Jude Perry and the Desolation, in five acts. A story about the decisions we make.)
Relationships: Agnes Montague/Jude Perry
Comments: 7
Kudos: 18
Collections: TMA Girls Week





	it will come back

**Author's Note:**

> i was thinking about the concepts of choice & free will in tma and also about how i wrote jon's relationship to his status as an avatar in [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24406501) and then i simply blacked out with this on the doc in front of me. 
> 
> title: it will come back by hozier ("honey, don't feed it / it will come back")
> 
> written as part of tma girls week day 2: avatars and entities!

The first time a man looks at her, really looks at her, like a piece of meat or an interesting trinket or a woman only half-grown, she recoils and bares her teeth at him on reflex. It does little to dissuade him; he laughs at her snarl and calls it cute, calls her charming. Jude does not want to be charming. Jude wants to be powerful. She wants this man’s sharp and mortifying gaze to be turned back on him so that she can flay him open like a starved corpse. 

She could have been Beholding, maybe. Certainly, that fantasy about gazes and averting them, redirecting them—she knows now that that had been the Watcher’s voyeurism, its desire bleeding into hers. Hers into it. (All fears feed most greedily on desires; one is the mother of another. It’s unclear which, sometimes.) 

All this to say Jude had considered Beholding. The Institute was in London, less than twenty minutes across the city, a backup plan if she ever needed one. But watching is all the Watcher does, after all. She doesn’t want to be the housefire, or the voyeur that documents it. She wants to be the arsonist. She wants to be powerful. Watching the men that in turn watch her is never enough—there is a passive naivety to it that disgusts her when she thinks about it too much. Crimes cannot be atoned for by matched crimes, only punished with different ones. 

There are many stories to be told about choices, and the things they drive one to do. Jude Perry makes choices, too. It’s nothing like the stories promised. 

— 

Annabelle is sitting in the dark, larger-than-life silhouette thrown onto the wall by flickering candlelight. Her hand is slowly twirling midair, and she’s staring at the elegant motion as if caught in a trance. As if orchestrating a trance. 

“Jude Perry,” she says, intoning it like a curse. Knowing Annabelle, it probably is. 

“Annabelle Cane,” she parrots right back, and Annabelle looks placidly at her. Her eyes are dark, dark, dark. In the dim light, there’s almost more than two of them. Eight eyes wrapped around her head, jewels on a crown, docile in their blank stillness. You don’t see the Web move until you do. (She twitches a finger, and her shadow jerks like a marionette on a string.) 

Jude laughs at the motion, bright and singing. The candle holding vigil next to them roars to life, impossibly, a bonfire raging on the blackened wick where only a single flame should have existed. On the wall, Annabelle’s outline warps and dances like a children’s drawing melting in hot wax as the light peels it back. 

Annabelle looks on, still so damnably serene. Her not-quite eyes glint with a kind of subtle malevolence hard to pin down. Jude hates it. All subtlety is rendered meaningless in the face of plain, cruel destruction. Control is a pitiful thing if untamed fire can do the work for her. 

“Does that feel good? The triumph, the destruction?” 

“Doubt I’d be here if it didn’t.” 

She moves, then. Her spindly fingers reach out, and suddenly there’s a lighter between them that she’s handing to Jude. Jude finds herself examining it on instinct—it’s the cheap disposable kind, purple and silver, filled halfway up with splashing fluid. On one side is a web pattern that seems to extend past the boundaries of the small object it has been etched onto. 

“A gift from the spider herself,” she says, raising an eyebrow. The lighter warms under her touch, but stays whole and unmelted. It might have been Jude who willed that decision. It might have not. 

“Take it.” Annabelle tucks her hair back behind one ear, throwing the mass of cobwebs on her head into sharp relief. A lone spider skitters between her fingers and adds another thread to the collection, this one spanning the length of Annabelle’s skull. 

That’s fine. If the Web wants an ally, someone who’ll do the dirty work for her, Jude can play mercenary. Jude can play any role that means she’ll get to feel the burning under her hands. 

So she takes the lighter. She pockets it. She smiles ferociously at Annabelle Cane, and this time, she is sure it is entirely her own smile. 

“Good choice, Cane,” she says. 

— 

When the Desolation comes calling, she answers. She kills the man. She lets him burn. 

Jude remembers cutting her own hair in a painfully fluorescent bathroom at eighteen; scissors closing greedily around dark strands and the gaping bowl of the sink eating them up as fast as they fell, cut off from their source. On the darkened street she’d chosen for this particular act, the flames eat away at his body in much the same way. She imagines his flesh peeling away from bone, bone turning into charred ash, ash scattering in the cruel wind. Scorched earth within the confines of a single living thing. 

What she leaves out from the story: The fire burns too much, too bright. Before she knows it, it’s smeared over the side of the nearest building and melting the cobblestones at her feet in a way that natural fire wouldn’t dare to. It’s not hungry the same way wildfire would be, though, just curious. Fear doesn’t desire, in and of itself; perhaps it would then be more accurate to say that  _ she  _ is hungry. The Desolation is reactionary, reading the landscape of her wants and repurposing the scene in front of her to better suit it. 

Jude wants fire, so the fire stays. 

That night, when she goes home, she takes out the book of matches Gretchen keeps next to her cigarettes, and lights one up. The sudden blaze leaps and dances, yellow and orange leaching into white, smoke curling off the end like a gaze crawling down one’s spine. She thinks about Nicolas Trikenzo, again. The act of burning itself is not important to the Desolation, but it is important to her; that is a distinction she is happy to make. She thinks about his body crisping to a blackened husk, and thinks about replacing his flesh with her own. The eye of the flame, the eye of every flame, is cold and blue. She would make it through, she knows. 

Hunger and desire and flame and fear. It all blurs together, and somewhere in the middle of it, Jude falls into a dreamless sleep. The match-flame in her hand, impossibly, burns through the night, but there is no light or warmth to its flicker. Nothing of what humankind had once prized it for. 

— 

“Are you afraid of anything, Jude?” Jane Prentiss used to be kind and curious, with big eyes the color of earth after rain. Even now, she still keeps asking questions like the answers mean something. 

“What is there for me to be afraid of, anymore?” 

Jane is newly claimed. Jane doesn’t quite understand how the game is played. Jude is a regular to their scene of gods and puppets and fear in a way that this girl is not. 

“Every fear wants a piece of us. Find one god and then the rest will swarm over you.” 

Jude wrinkles her nose. Such a Corruption-typical view of things. Nothing is simple or pure, not to those types; always looking for the invader, the foreign object, the weakness and the surrender and the inevitable  _ swarm.  _

“Every fear is the same one, darling,” Jude says. “It only matters which one acts first, and most brutal.” 

“Fear is not so different from devotion. From love. Only humans make that distinction, really.” 

She watches in fascination, in morbid horror, as a worm crawls out of the rotting flesh of Jane’s forearm. It drops to her feet in a silver-white twitch and wriggles into a crack between the floorboards—the weakness, the surrender. The swarm. There is a wretched kind of logic to the Crawling Rot. 

Filth and Desolation. Every fear takes, but they consume. They ruin what others would try to reap whole. 

Following her gaze to the ground, Jane hums, low and thoughtful and musical. As she sways her head, ragged hair falls over those big dark eyes. “They’re making a home,” she says. “We make homes out of everything we touch.” 

“And maybe someday I’ll burn them down.” 

Jude doesn’t mean it as a threat, and Jane doesn’t interpret it as one. Every fear is the same one, maybe their two most of all. Besides her, Jane’s skin ripples and shudders in a way that shouldn’t be humanly possible; then again, she thinks, that is rather the point. 

— 

The transformation is agonizing, but the thing about fire is that it must be fed. Gretchen is screaming, or maybe it’s just that Jude wants her to be. Somewhere, Agnes sits waiting in a cafe slowly emptying of its patrons, an untouched cup of scalding coffee on the table in front of her—when Jude is finished burning, she’ll go to her, and Agnes will know that she has survived. That she has been made anew. 

So the Desolation pries her skin from her bones and her life from her hands and Jude, clawing back the hot wax of her own face, lives. 

— 

“Late,” Nikola cries out into the emptiness of the warehouse. Her voice is mechanical and whining, not yet finished to human perfection. “Late,  _ late, late. _ Lateness is  _ unbecoming, _ Jude.” 

“Missed you too,” Jude says. She lights up two fingers just to prove she can, and Nikola makes a  _ tchk  _ sound in the back of her throat. Gears grind from deep within her plastic innards, too slow and inhumanly fast at the same time. 

“Yes, yes, you’re  _ very _ dangerous.  _ I’m _ dangerous too, firestarter.” 

“So you are.” 

It’s not a lie. Jude has always been uncharacteristically partial to the ideals of the Stranger, even if she finds its methods somewhat wanting. The idea that you can uproot a single person so thoroughly from their habitat of a life, seek out and unerringly  _ destroy— _ it’s devastating. It’s alluring. No less than the siren cry of the Desolation. 

But the Stranger’s domain remains confined to the uncanny, the _I-Do-Not-Know-You,_ the crawling feeling that nothing is quite right. What use is fear if it only slinks around the back of your neck like an alleyway cat nobody wants to feed? Fear is always more powerful in its confirmation. The Stranger takes, and nobody realizes except in dreams, in half-glances. What is the pain of destruction when there is no baseline for it? 

Nikola’s painted lips curve up like she knows what Jude is thinking. 

“Don’t worry, Jude,” she says. “We aren’t going to _force_ ourselves on you. You can do things _your_ way—” she pauses, plastic arms sweeping out theatrically as if readying themselves for a bow “—and we’ll do things _ours._ We have… such similar goals, after all. _Shame_ to not ally ourselves.”

Her intonation is all wrong. It makes her sound as if she’s singing, as if she’s laughing when she’s not. 

“I’m not interested in your esoteric politics,” Jude says shortly. “I serve the Flame, and even when I do that, I’m an independent player.” 

“Oh, but you’re _not,_ aren’t you? There’s _you,_ and there’s your _Montague girl,_ and _her_ Archivist, and the _esteemed_ Miss Annabelle, and—you understand, Jude. So many little _pieces_ in your life. The Desolation doesn’t make you _inhuman.”_ At this, she lets out a short giggle and gestures to her automaton’s body, its stolen jacket flapping around bone-white wrists. “You’re _not_ incapable of connection, Jude Perry. And your god can still take all those connections _away._ That’s what it does best, isn’t it?”

Nikola beams at her, unheeding of the fire crackling all the way up Jude’s bare arms. “Every _avatar_ thinks they’re above humanity. But I’m simply _not_ human _._ A step to the side of, if you will. It makes things so much less tedious, I tell you. 

“All those complicated,  _ tenuous  _ attachments.  _ However _ do you live?” She claps her hands, once, and the sound rings out gunshot-sharp. “Anyway. Enough of that. Let’s get to work.” 

Jude rolls her shoulders in response. She doesn’t dwell on Nikola’s words; no need to, when the inferno behind her is already lunging upwards. Power is power. 

When she’s done with the place, there’s only cinders and ashes left, and her companion is whistling cheerfully, satisfied. “Call me, Lightless Flame,” she sings as they make their exits. Her jointed fingers curl around air, the universal motion for picking up a telephone. Jude doesn’t snarl at her, but it’s a close thing. 

— 

The tattoo comes later, when her flesh is pliant and soft. It is not her suffering she wants, or her rebirth—she has no need for one, and already earned the right of the other. Jude is hardly in the business of inflicting pain onto  _ herself.  _

Candle wax is easy to shape, and if she concentrates hard enough, she can blacken it with vicious burn marks. This is really the only way. If anyone else were to touch her flesh, they would run screaming. (If a man tried to reach for her now, she would simply let the wax close its teeth around his hand. She is no longer watched or watcher.) The whole ordeal only takes one night; it’s less difficult than it should be, with the Desolation urging her on. 

When it’s over, Jude makes herself a mug of coffee and drags the mirror out from her bedroom to examine the scorched lines of her new fire-branded tattoo. 

From her reflection, the twisted face of Nicolas Trikenzo stares back at her. His eyes are blistered, contorted in what could either be ecstasy or agony—his mouth is screaming like someone can hear. There are flames wreathing his face, erupting from the makeshift darkness of his throat, but it’s clear that they are not  _ his _ flames. Somebody else owns the fire; owns him. In the half-light that dapples her candle-flesh back, the burning is an act in motion. 

Jude curves her mouth into a grin. Trikenzo’s expression stays frozen and static, a man standing witness to the very moment of his own destruction. 

When she returns to her coffee, the steam is still rising off it in fat, hungry coils. Things don’t ever stop burning around her anymore. Coffee, bridges. Flesh. 

— 

The door leads nowhere. It swings open like a screech of static, a broken bone, and a cacophony of shapes steps out. 

“You’re hungry, Lightless Flame,” Helen says. The shapes resolve into something that could resemble a woman, if Jude was trying very hard to politely look out of the corner of her eye. (Jude is not. She’s staring directly at the maw of the doorway, and it’s giving her a headache.) 

“I’m always hungry. It’s in the name.” 

Helen’s cackle of laughter fragments into separate pieces that spiral away from her. Behind them, the Distortion’s corridors rearrange into orange and yellow, crude mockups of a burning room. 

“Desolation avatars,” she says, clicking her tongue. The nearest corridor draws up a landscape of messy fractals. “What do you want, Jude?” 

“Can’t come to say hello?” 

“Not you.” 

“Why not?” Jude crosses her arms and leans against the groaning yellow wood of the door, just to be contrary. The Distortion does so hate people touching their supposedly untouchable trinkets. Helen just gives her a colorful, beaming smile. 

“You’re not the sociable type. You burn down people’s houses, mostly.” 

“Mm,” she agrees. The door shifts and pauses against her bare skin, and Jude is seized with a wild kind of curiosity. She hasn’t been curious in a very long time—the Desolation has never required her to  _ know. _

“What’s it like?” She jerks her head at the wood that is now not quite wood, the endlessly iterating corridors on the other side. “Being the Distortion. How does it feel?” 

“Oh, you might as well ask me how I feel about the sky being blue. I don’t feel much about it, one way or another. I simply am.” 

Jude snorts. Typical. Avatars and their cryptic avoidance tactics, all of them. “You must have had a life. You were Helen before this, too.” 

“And I am still Helen. And you are still Jude.” Helen looks at her with an unswerving gaze. Her eyes creak like doorways, empty ones. “We simply made other choices.” 

— 

Jude Perry happens like this. At eighteen, she cuts her hair and changes her name to something that a man could call himself. She disowns her parents before they can disown her. At twenty, she starts smoking, carries lighters in the pocket nearest her skin. At twenty-one, she fucks a woman for the first time. Her name will be claimed by the years before Jude is, but she has hair like flames that drape over the both of them, and she calls Jude holy. It isn’t enough, it never is. 

Years pass. All this bullshit about control and agency—it’s still so passive. Fuck control. If it can’t give her what she wants, then maybe losing it will. She tries cocaine. She tries heroin. Anything to chase a high. She becomes a banker like her parents wanted, as if that would make up for the rest of it. Years pass, again, and this time they do so too quickly. She tries cocaine one more time, just to be sure, and then from there it becomes routine. Her favorite thing to do while buzzed is gamble. Ruining someone else’s life is its own kind of euphoria. Ruining her own, an added bonus. 

It takes too long to realize that it isn’t the high she likes, or the recklessness; it’s the destruction. 

Then the Desolation happens, and by then it doesn’t matter. Rewind—which choice? From which horrible choice did the fire first emerge? Which was the oxygen and which was the tinder and which was the thing that burned to ash? 

— 

All stories lead back to Agnes in the end. Agnes is prophet and martyr and witness. Jude is violence, plain and simple. She wants Agnes in every human way there is to want another person, and in some inhuman ways, too. To save her life, or take it, all desire distilled down to those two warring extremes and caught in the licks of Agnes’s bright hair. She hasn’t been burned in years but this might be the closest she’s ever come. 

They don’t talk. 

Agnes simply takes her by the hand, and they walk into the building that’s burning down around them. Fire glints off the exposed metal struts, the jutting bones of the structure. Someone screams. 

The center of the building was where the fire started; it should by all rights be hotter than any two humans can bear, but neither Jude nor Agnes are quite that anymore. They are themselves. They are something else. 

Agnes’s skin is scorching. It must be—their joined fingers are fusing together from the heat as they stand in the very middle of the room and sway in an approximation of slow-dancing. Agnes’ hand is a brand on her waist. Their waist. There’s no delineation between the two of them anymore, as if they’ve been pressed into the shape of a single eight-limbed creature ungainly amidst the destruction. Wax pools at their feet and runs down Jude’s jawline, Agnes’s cheeks. Their flame-made face. 

“I want you,” Jude says. It’s low and humming and it might even be true. 

Agnes looks at her, her eyes dark beyond comprehension. There could be nothing in them, or everything. It’s always a coin toss with Agnes. “I love you,” she says, like she’s following a script. The sound reverberates through her throat and comes out of Jude’s mouth. It’s unclear whose voice is being borrowed. What is left of her face is pale and smooth, a moon hanging above the desolation of their bodies. A moon, or an eye. 

Jude doesn’t call her a liar. The fire burns around them and through them, and they simply dance in its molten, maddened stillness. 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: [autoclavesjpg](https://autoclavesjpg.tumblr.com)


End file.
